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"That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made."
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Exlpore more Disaster quotes
"The minute you think you've got it made, disaster is just around the corner."
"The biggest stories in 2005 were the national disasters."
"If I could learn to treat triumph and disaster the same, then I would find bliss."
"What's sort of interesting about the whole public relations disaster that is the Net, in some ways, is that the fundamentals are really good."
"Disasters work like alarm clocks to the world, hence God allows them. They are shouting, 'Wake up! Love! Pray!"
"That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made."
"You know, when something like, even like a coal mine disaster, or something like this, you think that well everybody's going to make a run to be able to get out, but it happened to fast that they were just all dead."
"It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster."
Explore more quotes by Zadie Smith
"American houses...' she said, peering over her right shoulder and down the street. 'They always seem to believe that nobody ever loses anything, has lost anything. I find that very sad. Do you know what I mean?"
"And it's time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings."
"The future's another country, man... And I still ain't got a passport."
"Samad! My mouth is like the grave! Whatever is told to me dies with me.'Whatever was told to Zinat invariably lit up the telephone network, rebounded off aerials, radio waves, and satellites along the way, picked up finally by advanced alien civilizations as it bounced through the atmosphere of planets far removed from this one."
"I have known many true connoisseurs, with excellent tastes that range across the humanities and the culinary arts--and they never fail to have a fatal effect on my self-esteem. When I find myself sitting at dinner next to someone who knows just as much about novels as I do but has somehow also found the mental space to adore and be knowledgeable about the opera, have strong opinions about the relative rankings of Renaissance painters, an encyclopedic knowledge of the English civil war, of French wines--I feel an anxiety that nudges beyond the envious into the existential. How did she find the time?"
"When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it's a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears."
"You don't come to live here unless the delusion of a reality shaped around your own desires isn't a strong aspect of your personality. 'A reality shaped around your own desires' - there is something sociopathic in that ambition."
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